Published by EH.Net (December 2022).

Michael Pye. *Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age*.
New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2021. xii + 273 pp. $28.95 (hardback),
ISBN: 978-1-64313-777-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Raingard Esser, University of Groningen.



The title chosen by the US publisher of the present book (as compared to
the slightly more prosaic title of the European edition, *Antwerp: The
Glory Years*) sets the tone for this panoramic survey of one of Europe’s
most important early modern cities. It indicates both the superlatives and
the nostalgia attached to this lively portrait of the metropolis. Michael
Pye, a British historian, journalist, and author currently living in
Amsterdam, provides his readers with a colourful kaleidoscope of elements
that came together in Antwerp and that shaped and were in turn shaped by
the city. This is skillfully done through a series of vignettes which focus
on its highly international inhabitants. Many of those inhabitants were
newcomers from elsewhere in Europe seizing Antwerp’s opportunities to
accumulate riches for themselves, for their families, friends and clients.
They also generated wealth, prestige, and values for and in Antwerp, which
thrived on its image as a centre of creativity and as a way of life. The
stories and their protagonists, whom Pye presents, are based on a mine of
rich and diverse sources very often from outside the city, which lost many
of its archives during the violent mutiny of Habsburg troops in 1576.

Pye elegantly weaves together information from letters, paintings,
contemporary histories, novellas, travel accounts, schoolbooks, and songs
to provide a series of portraits of famous and less famous men and women
who lived, worked, took refuge, and died in the city. Some of them moved on
after a temporary stay. His protagonists are property developers such as
Gilbert van Schoonbeke, printer/publishers such as Christoffel Plantijn,
the female painter Catharina van Hemessen, the language teacher Peeter
Heyns, the African servant Katharina (no surname given), early modern
adventurers such as Gaspar Ducci who tried his hand in various more or less
successful enterprises, and merchant families such as the Portuguese Jews
Mendes, who operated in an international network all over Europe and
beyond. The common thread in these vignettes is the portrayal of a city in
which “everything goes”, where large-scale immigration brought new skills,
new products, new markets, new knowledge, and new knowledge sites. The
precondition of these opportunities, in Pye’s reading, was religious
tolerance (in the early modern sense of the concept) and restraint in
political and administrative intervention from urban and religious
authorities and the Habsburg rulers of the time.

These stories of the “Golden Years” are harnessed to a chronology which
spans the late fifteenth to the second half of the sixteenth century or,
more specifically, to the Iconoclastic Fury (1566) and its aftermath
characterized by the arrival of the “arch-villain” of Low Countries
history, the “Iron Duke” of Alva as new Governor General. Given that the
underlying message of Antwerp’s success delivered in Pye’s story is the
city’s economic, religious and cultural openness, this end-date – rather
gloomily titled “Antwerp is lost” (thus the title of Chapter 14) – might
make sense in the light of the tightening rule of the Habsburg regime in
the Southern Low Countries, which had already been inaugurated by the
highly contested diocesan restructuring that the Spanish king Philip II had
instigated in 1559. This, however, is a rather one-sided view of the city’s
fortunes, which overplays the role of the confessional regime imposed by
the Habsburg authorities and underplays Antwerp’s continuing influence as
an international entrepot and global player both in the later decades of
the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century. In a way Pye’s chronology
continues and even predates an older narrative of Antwerp’s perceived
decline. Earlier historiography up to the end of the twentieth century had
diagnosed an “ongelukseeuw” – a century of disaster – for the period from
1585 onwards, when the city was retaken by Habsburg’s forces after a
five-year period of a Calvinist city council, and the closure of Antwerp’s
economic sinew, the river Schelde, for international trade. Much has been
written in recent years to redress this narrative, which had also been
framed in the context of Amsterdam’s rise as an international powerhouse.
The effects of the exodus of skilled artisans and merchants from Antwerp to
Amsterdam in the wake of 1585 and the continuing contribution to
high-calibre science and arts, for instance in mathematics and
architecture, in the Southern Netherlands, have been reassessed emphasizing
Antwerp’s enduring role as a centre of trade and knowledge production under
Habsburg auspices well into the seventeenth century. (For an overview of
the historiography of Antwerp, see Raingard Esser, \”Antwerpens
\’Altweibersommer\’: Wirtschaft und Kultur in der Scheldestadt zwischen
\’Fall\’ (1585) und \’Frieden\’ (1648),\” in *Wolfenbütteler
Barock-Nachrichten* 43, 1, 2016, pp. 65-84.)

In Pye’s reading, however, the factors that contributed to the endurance of
Antwerp’s role as an international entrepot and cultural centre – the
networks of the Catholic Church and, more specifically, the Jesuits
operating on the forefront of the Counter-Reformation – have been largely
ignored in his book. Antwerp’s printing presses became smaller and less
numerous than their Amsterdam rivals, but in 1572 Christoffel Plantijn
managed to secure the monopoly to print all breviaries and other liturgical
texts for the Habsburg empire, including the large and increasing market in
Latin America. Given that religious texts still made up by the far largest
number of print products in the seventeenth century, this was a highly
lucrative concession.  Also missing are the landmarks of the Catholic
agenda of the city, such as the Cathedral and the many religious houses and
churches, which formed the fora as well as the financial back-up for much
of the exquisite art, for which Antwerp’s artistic community was
internationally acclaimed. In Pye’s reading, however, these are much more
orchestrated achievements in support of the Habsburg regime and the
Counter-Reformation programme of the Catholic Church, rather than the
free-ranging enterprises which characterized the earlier decades of the
sixteenth century.

The second outdated paradigm that Pye perpetuates in this story centres
around the incompatibility of strong guilds and successful entrepreneurship
and merchant enterprises. He repeatedly refers to the weakness of Antwerp’s
guilds at the time, which allowed for unrestricted market enterprises, new
products, and new methods of production unrestrained by rules and
regulations installed to keep the status quo of artisanal standards. This
perspective ignores the creative power of guilds, again, particularly in
the realm of the fine arts including high-quality silverware,
top-of-the-range wooden furniture, tapestries, and other luxury products,
which were a signature of Antwerp’s trademark as a centre of innovative
high-end products. (On the role of early modern guilds, particularly in
Antwerp, see the studies of Antwerp historian Bert de Munck, in Karel
Davids & Bert de Munck, eds., *Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval
and Early Modern European Cities*, Ashgate 2014. See also de Munck, *Guilds,
Labour and the Urban Body Politic: Fabricating Community in the Southern
Netherlands, 1300-1800*, Routledge 2017.)

The neglect of more recent literature on guilds and their role as guardians
of quality is all the more striking since Pye is otherwise well aware of
the recent trends in the historiography around Antwerp. His footnotes refer
to studies written in many European academic languages, which in turn,
demonstrates the international relevance of this very special early modern
European metropolis.

What is perhaps not surprising for a book written for the wider anglophone
market is that there is considerable coverage of the role of Antwerp in
Anglo-Flemish relations and particularly of the agenda of English reformers
such as William Tyndale, whose New Testament in English was printed in the
city. Overall, however, international relations in and with Antwerp are
well-balanced ranging from Lisbon to Istanbul, from Jerusalem to Mexico,
from Cologne to Seville.

The composition of the text as a series of vignettes leads to some
overlaps, repetition, and jumbled chronology. Sometimes, the story seems
just to peter out (see, for instance, pp. 40-41). There are some musings
which perhaps are meant as impulses to reflect on current debates, and it
might be in this light that the rejection of guilds as stumbling blocks for
free enterprises could be seen, thus reflecting more on the neo-liberal
agenda of contemporary British politics than on power relations in early
modern Antwerp. But, overall, this is a very readable book, which is richly
illustrated with well-known and some lesser-known images of the city and
its illustrious inhabitants.



Raingard Esser is professor of early modern history at the University of
Groningen, The Netherlands. Her main areas of interest are early modern
migration and border studies, and her recent publications include
“Norwich’s ‘Disorderly Maids’: Immigrant Women and the Institutions in
Early Modern England”, in Raingard Esser & Anita Boele, eds., *Nieuwe
Tijdingen:**Genderpatronen in vroegmoderne *(Leuven, 2021), and
\”Niederländische und Wallonische Migrantinnen in Frühneuzeitlichen
Exulantengemeinden”, in Victoria Asschenfeld, et al, eds., *Die Neustadt
Hanau: Ein Drehkreuz im Europäischen Kunst- und Wissenstransfer* (Sandstein
Verlag, 2022).

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